Sunday, May 04, 2014

Laressa Dickey, Bottomland

Between

I have not said my
prayers. My god is tired and lonely. Dressed to see him, I am lonely too. My
brother makes pecan pies and wears a blue hat. In the corner, our mother
murmurs the prayer of the 7th horse and rolls a penny along the
slanting floor. No one comes to talk with me. That boy snaps his fingers, tap
dances to The Night Hank Williams Came to
Town. A long time ago, our mother saw a portrait of a woman who reminded
her of an orphan, someone she knew and could not save. I have never said enough
prayers. My god rolls around in the back of a pickup. Our mother stomps
mushrooms with her open hands and they puff out smoke. No one tells me it’s
time to eat. (“Bottomland”)

Minnesota “poet, dancer, writing consultant and somatic worker” Laressa Dickey’s first
trade poetry collection is Bottomland
(Bristol UK: Shearsman, 2014), a book, as the catalogue copy tell us, that “sustains
something of the spirit and space of the poem over a longer period of time, and
explores the poem as an improvisational space. The poems were born in the deep
chill of the Minnesota winter, and they begin out of her experience and memories
of growing up on her family’s tobacco farm in Tennessee, but move on to much
more.” Dickey’s poems in Bottomland seem
geographically fixed under a very large sky, sketched out as postcards from a
complex rural expanse, and acknowledge both the lighter and darker aspects of
country living, a ravenous intellectual curiosity, and even a kind of charming,
self-aware folksiness. As she writes to open the first poem in the final
section, “Mimesis, synaptic”: “His mother said he put his ear to the ground
when he was scared. I stood across the café from him when this happened. We
were lost, but then I crossed the room to put my ear down. It cost fifty cents,
but it cost.” Constructed in six extended sequences—“American Rough-Leg,”
“Bottomland,” “Catalogue of Utilities,” “A Pictorial History of Wilderness,”
“Route to Cloudless, Day” and “Mimesis, synaptic”—the poems in Bottomland are physical, descriptive and
restless, and built of lines rushing along in an extended, at times breathless,
gallop. “From above, the land only patterns,” she writes, in the poem
“Espalier,” the first of the title sequence, continuing: “lines of which
connote movement. This does not equal progress.”

7

Grasslands came before
man, coal swamps before reptiles. Avian, then floral. A million years pressed
to stone, as lips, as fins. See: fish specialized for life in quiet waters.
Some stories are shapes burned together. The tongue a torch on fire, remember
it as a planked platform. We bisect the street, slip fingers out of mittens.
Tiny photographs of your turning wrist we piece together. Somewhere a shallow
field lobbing rockets, agrees with its verb here, to kill, as if. (“American
Rough-Leg”)

Bottomland explores an
articulation and exploration of personal origins and landscape, the myths and
even the dreams of landscape, and does so fixed in a cinematic panorama of homemade
pecan pies, magnolia, grandparents, power lines, tobacco leaves and the rushing
river. “The distance is inside me and viscous,” she writes, in a section of “American
Rough-Leg.” It is as though the poems are not of the geographies she references,
but emerge from those geographies, as poems and author, both, unable to
completely dislocate from such a strong and rich terrain. In many ways, Bottomland exists as a love letter to
those unnamed landscapes and histories, complex and storied throughout, ready
to bristle, burn and overwhelm at any moment. In the poem “Devotion,” she writes:
“Some people find hope in dreams / live in between small rock crevices. Down //
this road, the day sings.” The poem ends with: